Nelly Furtado

Depending on your perspective, Nelly Furtado's second album was either the genuine article or a giant failure when compared to 2006's Loose. But rather than the disparate poles they appear to be, think of the two albums instead as two roads that diverged from Furtado's debut. Folklore may be the road less traveled, an exploration of the folksier terrain of Furtado's folk-hop map (with pit stops in the land of whimsical singer-songwriter soul), but it leads back to the same point of origin as Loose. "Fresh off the Boat" (partially in Portuguese, like many tracks here) is a world unto itself.

It's been three years since Nelly Furtado's debut -- enough time for her to sell 2 million CDs,
win a Grammy and have a baby. But the song remains the same: A slick multiculti
hodgepodge, Folklore is a Whoa, Nelly! redux, without a single as good as "I'm Like a Bird."
The twenty-four-year-old kicks things off by proclaiming, "I am not a one-trick pony," but
fails to back up that claim on the eleven songs that follow. Aside from the mecha... More >